It’s all very easy for those of us in the supposedly “free” West to shake our heads at paranoid authoritarian regimes like China, which rigorously censor anything and everything. We tut as Beijing’s inquisitors wield high technology to spy on their citizens and suppress every vestige of free expression. Why, we scoff, even Winnie the Pooh (supposedly a disparaging reference to Xi Jinping) is banned from Chinese social media!
Don’t kid yourself that things aren’t going the same way, here.
Left-wing governments and global corporations are rapidly weaponising the algorithms which are at the heart of nearly all modern life. Of course, as censors will, they hide their true intentions behind a firewall of self-righteous bullshit about ‘inclusion’ and ‘compassion’. But every now and then the curtain twitches aside just a little.
Retail giant Kmart has come under fire after an apparent ban by photo printing kiosks on religious words such as “church” and “Jesus”, while others, including “mosque” and “Islam”, were approved.
The great crusade of the anti-free speech authoritarians is “hate speech”. Not that they ever deign to define it in unambiguous terms. “When you see it, you know it”, Jacinda Ardern says. As a result, the only way we can tell what the globalist elite regard as “hate speech” is to observe the results.
Kmart says a software error led to “offensive” words being replaced by asterisks as customers tried to caption their images at store photo booths.
Bemused shoppers found that “church”, “God”, “bible” and “Allah” were deemed to be profanity and were replaced. “Mosque”, “Islam” and “Koran” were deemed acceptable.
The Daily Telegraph reports the photo kiosk mishap, after a young couple realised their captions had been altered.
A spokeswoman for Kmart said the problem had been caused by a system error in the machines made by Kodak, which created a default list of banned words and was not specific to Christianity.
If a list of “banned words” includes “Jesus”, “God” and “church”, but not “Islam” and “Koran”, how is that not specific to Christianity?
Then, of course, we are treated to the usual nostrums of “diversity” and “inclusiveness”.
“At Kmart, we support diversity and inclusiveness irrespective of race, religion, age, gender, ethnicity, ability, appearance or attitude and we want our teams and stores to reflect the communities in which we operate.”
theaustralian
It’s purely coincidental that this “diverse”, “inclusive” society repeatedly punishes the Christian, the straight, the white and the male. Ask Israel Folau how “inclusive” this brave new world of stultifying “progressiveness” really is. The globalist elite can only insult us with obvious lies for so long.
Or is that the point?
If we blithely accept the obvious lie that gender is an interchangeable “construct”, that all white people are innately “privileged” and that anti-free speech algorithms have just made a mistake when they blacklist Christianity, we’re suckers for anything.